For me, the most shocking aspect of sudden social crazes would be how quickly they arise and how quickly they die. We, the survivors, look back and say, "How could people have acted like this? How could they have allowed this to happen?"
The past offers many examples of "here today, gone later today" mass delusions. The New England witch craze tore life apart, until, one day, the craze vanished. McCarthyism took a wrecking ball to American society, until one day, it ran out of gas. It simply stopped.
One example from my own lifetime would be the great Satanic Panic media craze. No one mentions it now, but many people were sucked into mass hysteria. Where are these people today? What prompted them to stop shouting, "We must believe the children," and to stop spreading false memories as gospel truth? Do these people look back and wonder, "What the hell was wrong with me?" Do they ever look back at all?
What if they never look back? What would this reveal about human beings and the force of human denial? And what would this imply for tomorrow?
I suspect that, ten years from now, students of history will stare back at our times and wonder how on Earth we could have seen the castration of boys and the genital mutilation of girls as therapeutic; how the hell we could have believed that people are defined not by character or class or learning or achievement or compassion or thought, but by the colour of their skins; how in the name of all that we hold true we could have cancelled people not for their actions, but merely because they disagreed with us on topics where people have always, and always will, disagree?
At the same time, I have to wonder if people in these corporations, governments, and institutions caught up in the current madness will shake themselves, wake up, and wonder, "How could I have believed this?"
Or will, they, instead, move on and never look back... until they fall prey to the next mass delusion?
